Read this. If a tenth of what is in it is accurate… Well, you know.
Tag: Leviathan
Three Felonies a Day,
I recently finished reading Harvey Silverglate’s Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.
Here’s another example of what he was writing about. Read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:
…every incentive that we put in place as a company was designed to encourage people to achieve their goals. All these incentives had the caveat that the goals must be achieved while obeying the law. Now that may sound simple, but in virtually every meeting every day people discuss their goals and how they will achieve them. They almost never discuss accounting law. In a sales forecast meeting, you will often hear, “What can we do to get this closed by the end of the quarter?” You never hear, “Will the way we made the commitment comply with Statement of Position-97-2 (the critical software accounting rule)?”
Beyond that, U.S. accounting law is extremely difficult to understand and often seems illogical and random. For example, the law in question with respect to stock options, FAS 123, is filled with paragraphs such as this:
“This Statement does not specify the measurement date for share-based payment transactions with nonemployees for which the measure of the cost of goods acquired or services received is based on the fair value of the equity instruments issued. EITF Issue No. 96-18, “Accounting for Equity Instruments That Are Issued to Other Than Employees for Acquiring, or in Conjunction with Selling, Goods or Services”, establishes criteria for determining the measurement date for equity instruments issued in share-based payment transactions with nonemployees.”
And that is the clear part.
Here’s Ayn Rand once again on the topic:
There is no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is to crack down on criminals. When there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking the law. Create a nation of lawbreakers and then you can cash in on the guilt. Now that’s the system! – Atlas Shrugged, 1957
As others have observed, Rand wrote a cautionary tale. It seems more every day that it’s being used instead as an instruction manual.
Quote of the Day – Edward Snowden Edition
But given our media, the public won’t be informed, and being uniformed the public won’t get angry, so no worries!
“…only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise.”
I’m sure everyone remembers this:
News out of LA yesterday:
Shooting during Dorner stakeout violated policy, panel rules
Eight Los Angeles police officers who opened fire on two women delivering newspapers in a pickup truck during the hunt for Christopher Dorner violated the LAPD’s policy on using deadly force, the department’s oversight body found Tuesday.
In making its ruling, the Police Commission followed the recommendation of LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, who faulted the officers for jumping to the conclusion that Dorner was in the truck. Beck said the officers compounded their mistake by shooting in one another’s direction with an unrestrained barrage of gunfire.
Reports made public Tuesday offered new details of the hours that led up to the shooting and how it erupted into a wild, one-sided firefight in which the officers fired shotguns and handguns more than 100 times. One woman was shot twice in the back; her daughter received superficial wounds.
—
A panel of high-ranking police officials that reviewed the shooting urged Beck to clear the officers of wrongdoing, according to several sources who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the case.
Violated policy. POLICY. How about LAW? Common sense? Decency?
So, thirty days without donuts, or do they get a six-week paid vacation (suspension with pay)?
THIS Was Caused by a Video
…I think it’s safe to say.
Cook’s Postulate is:
The key to understanding the American system is to imagine that you have the power to make nearly any law you want. But your worst enemy will be the one to enforce it. – Rick Cook
Dinesh D’Souza, vocal critic of Barack Obama and creator of the film 2016: Obama’s America, has just been given that lesson in spades.
D’Souza has been arrested and indicted for violation of campaign finance law. Specifically:
According to an indictment made public on Thursday in federal court in Manhattan, D’Souza around August 2012 reimbursed people who he had directed to contribute $20,000 to the candidate’s campaign.
The Justice Department in the form of the U.S. Attorney for Manhattan, Preet Bharara, proclaimed:
As we have long said, this Office and the FBI take a zero tolerance approach to corruption of the electoral process.
The mind simply boggles.
Nothing was done about voter intimidation in Philadelphia.
Nobody at Justice said “boo” when the Obama campaign accepted unverified credit card donations during his re-election run.
Not a peep out of the DoJ when Al Franken “won” his Senate race through voter fraud.
The list of “corruptions of the electoral process” are long and have been getting longer each year, but NOW the DoJ is ON THE JOB!
Like when the Bush DoJ prosecuted prominent lawyer Pierce O’Donnell for illegally contributing $26,000 to John Edwards’ presidential campaign the same way D’Souza is now accused. O’Donnell accepted a plea deal and got “60 days in prison, a year of supervised release, 500 hours of community service, plus a $20,000 fine.”
I’ve been reading Harvey Silverglate’s Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, and one thing he points out early on is the power the DoJ has to coerce people into being witnesses:
Prosecutors are able to structure plea bargains in ways that make it nearly impossible for normal, rational, self-interested calculating people to risk going to trial. The pressure on innocent defendants to plead guilty and “cooperate” by testifying against others in exchange for a reduced sentence is enormous – so enormous that such cooperating witnesses often fail to tell the truth, saying instead what prosecutors want to hear. As Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz has colorfully put it, such cooperating defendant-witnesses “are taught not only to sing, but also to compose.”
Can’t wait to see who the prosecution will be dragging out as witnesses.
A recent Gallup poll indicates that “trust in government” is at an all-time low, with 57% of those polled indicating the trust the government “not very much” or “not at all” when handling domestic problems. But when queried on their faith in the Judicial Branch, 62% of those polled said they had a “great deal” to a “fair amount” of faith.
I think that’s about to change, too.
No matter what, the DoJ has bottomless pockets, and unless some high-powered law firm agrees to represent him pro bono, D’Souza doesn’t.
It’s called “Lawfare,” and when practiced by the government against its citizens, it is particularly vicious. I have very little doubt that this is what is going on in the prosecution of D’Souza. I don’t know if he’s guilty or not. I DO know that when the Left is profiting, not a word is said, not a soul is prosecuted. When it’s their ox being gored, SOMEONE MUST PAY! And, honestly, I do not doubt that the Obama administration through the Holder Justice Department is exercising “the Chicago Way” here. As Glenn Reynolds put it:
Is there anything this administration does that isn’t politically motivated?
In other words, I know who I trust, and it isn’t the .gov.
UPDATE: Read this. Had enough yet?
Quote of the Day from Erik Prince, ex-CEO of Blackwater:
“Look,” he says, grasping to end our talk on an optimistic note, “America can pull its head out at any time. That happens at the ballot box. Ballot boxes have consequences still in America.” He continues: “But the American electorate has to actually pay attention, has to turn off the Xbox long enough to pay attention. Otherwise they’re going to continue to elect the government they deserve.”
Doesn’t Fit The Narrative™
Yesterday I stumbled across this story at BusinessInsider.com, CONFIRMED: The DEA Struck A Deal With Mexico’s Most Notorious Drug Cartel:
An investigation by El Universal found that between the years 2000 and 2012, the U.S. government had an arrangement with Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed the organization to smuggle billions of dollars of drugs while Sinaloa provided information on rival cartels.
Sinaloa, led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, supplies 80% of the drugs entering the Chicago area and has a presence in cities across the U.S.
There have long been allegations that Guzman, considered to be “the world’s most powerful drug trafficker,” coordinates with American authorities.
Read the whole thing, but there is this disclaimer at the bottom:
This post has caused many to interpret that the U.S. government is actively supporting Sinaloa. That has not been established, despite claims by Zambada-Niebla’s lawyer and Stratfor’s source. What El Universal’s investigation and the newly published court documents reveal is that there was a strong correlation between 2005 and 2009 regarding the rise of the Sinaloa cartel and the DEA’s relatively regular contact with a top Sinaloa lawyer.
This story reminded me of the El Paso Times report from July of 2011 that U.S. military weapons (the real thing, not semi-autos from border gun shops) were being smuggled to the Zetas cartel through Texas and New Mexico – Zetas may be smuggling weapons:
The brutally violent Zetas drug organization may be smuggling military-grade weapons through El Paso and Columbus, N.M., to feed its ongoing battles against other cartels and to possibly disrupt the 2012 elections in Mexico.
Phil Jordan, a former director of the DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center and a former CIA operative, said the Zetas have shipped large amounts of weapons through the El Paso area.
A federal law enforcement agency in El Paso said it has no information about the allegations that the Zetas are smuggling weapons through El Paso.
“They are purchasing weapons in the Dallas area and are flying them to El Paso, and then they are taking them across the border into Juárez,” said Jordan, a law enforcement consultant and former DEA official who still has contacts in the law enforcement community.
—
Robert “Tosh” Plumlee, a former CIA contract pilot, supported Jordan’s allegations and said the Zetas allegedly also purchased property in the Columbus-Palomas border region to stash weapons and other contraband.
He said purchasing property and setting up a weapons-smuggling network suggests that the Zetas were establishing a staging area for their operations.
DEA Special Agent Diana Apodaca, spokeswoman for El Paso’s DEA office, said the agency did not have any information about the Zetas allegedly operating in this border region.
No one from the Border Patrol or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives returned calls Tuesday for comment.
Earlier this month, Plumlee had a debriefing with the Border Patrol in Las Cruces about the intelligence he gathered when he accompanied the U.S. military’s Task Force 7 along the border. The military, which assists civilian law enforcement in counter-drug operations, was looking into allegations of gun smuggling along the border.
“The military task force became concerned that its information about arms smuggling was being compromised,” Plumlee said. “From the intel, it appears that a company was set up in Mexico to purchase weapons through the U.S. Direct Commercial Sales program, and that the company may have had a direct link to the Zetas.”
Under the Direct Commercial Sales program, the U.S. State Department regulates and licenses businesses to sell weapons and defense services and training for export. Last year, according to U.S. statistics, the program was used to provide Mexico $416.5 million worth of weapons and equipment, including military-grade weaponry.
The program is different from the U.S. Foreign Military Sales program, which operates on a government-to-government basis.
Plumlee said military-grade weapons were found in a Juárez warehouse two years ago, and some of them were moved later to a ranch elsewhere in Juárez. Arms stash houses have also been reported in places across the border from Columbus and Antelope Wells, N.M.
“They’ve found anti-aircraft weapons and hand grenades from the Vietnam War era,” Plumlee said. Other weapons found include grenade launchers, assault rifles, handguns and military gear including night-vision goggles and body armor.
Do read the whole thing.
Two things about this struck me: One, it would appear that the Department of Justice is working with one cartel and the State Department is (or was) working with a different cartel. Two, neither of these stories has any traction with the major media. UPI picked up the El Paso Times story, but I found no other major media references to it in Google. The new Business Insider piece? Crickets.
I guess Bridgeghazi is more important.
UPDATE: I contacted the reporter from the El Paso Times piece, Diana Washington Valdez, with the question “I was curious as to whether there was any follow-on to this story?” Her response:
No, because neither ATF or DEA will provide any more information. All they keep saying is that the investigation is ongoing. (I think the investigation is long over.)
This is my shocked face….
An Obamacare Photo-essay
While you’re waiting, here’s a short photo-essay I started a while ago, and never posted. Part of Instapundit‘s “peeling an onion of fail” meme:
Feel free to link to anything you think I should add in the comments. I’ll see what I can do. Must be a graphic.
Sarah Hoyt is as Optimistic as Bill Whittle
Read her post, Cassandra’s Fate.
Interesting take.
Pullquote:
Our current clowns didn’t take over a country in such dire straights that their fumble-footed rule is an improvement. Yes, they did what they could through the eight years of GW Bush (and well, he didn’t help much) to make it seem like we were back in dustbowl years. But again, people know what they lived through and what their neighbors lived through.
These days most of the people on the net going “it was worse under Booosh” are either obviously mentally ill or paid to say so. (And there aren’t as many of them as there used to be.)
Worse, while all the initial successful totalitarians of the twentieth century came from what could be termed the “middle class” these precious flowers ain’t. In fact, they are so far off the middle class, they think it’s a rhetoric flourish “And the middle class.”
They are in fact from the uptiest (totally a word) of the upper crust (yes, do tell me about Obama’s impoverished ghetto childhood living with a bank manager. Pfui.) and so out of touch with the middle class it might be a foreign land.
…the Magic Fairy Dust of Government Authority
Today’s Failure to Fire:
Just another illustration of Moshe Ben-David’s observation up there on the masthead.
On that “Reset Button” Question…
Hi, my name is Kevin, and I’ve been away for a little while.
In trying to get caught up on my blog reading, I ran across a link to a little piece by Daniel Greenfield over at Sultan Knish that I think more people (lots more people) should read. It’s titled The Supersessionists of the Liberal Confederacy, (h/t Otto). Daniel’s premise is that, well:
Ted Cruz has come the closest to understanding that the other side just doesn’t play by any rules, but lacks the leverage to make much of that. Cruz is still a product of a system in which there are rules. And that system is as unfit for challenging the left-wing radicals running things as trying to play a game of chess against an opponent who feels like moving the pieces any which way he feels like and always claims to have won.
Law is a consensus. If you stop keeping the law, the police arrest you. If a gang of left-wing radicals in a basement somewhere stopped following the law, they might be locked up. It’s not a certain thing considering that mad bomber Bill Ayers is a university professor. But once those same left-wing radicals control much of the system and the media that reports on the system, they have no reason to follow the law.
He explores the consequences of this loss of consensus. To wit:
On one side there is no consensus and no law; only sheer will. On the other there is a body of legal traditions going back centuries.
It’s painfully clear that two such approaches cannot coexist within a single government. And those who have the power and follow no rules have the supreme advantage of wielding government power without the legal restrictions that were meant to bind the abuse of that power.
I’ve read the piece twice. I don’t think he’s wrong.
I’m reminded once again of Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, his magnum opus. I recommend you read (if you haven’t) my überpost on it from January, 2010.
This will not end well.
Edited to add: Just after hitting “Publish” on this piece, I went and read Bill Whittle’s latest essay, Bamboo Spears. Also highly recommended.